The Piccaso Museum in Barcelona remembers Ubú, the totalitarian king that everyone laughed at | Culture

Alfred Jarry (Laval, 1873-Paris, 1907) premiered the play Ubu rey on December 10, 1896 in Paris at only 23 years old. The chronicles of the time speak of laughter and insults. They were not aware that the plump and delirious character they had on stage, an image of totalitarian despotism, would become a representative of the blackest humor and a literary icon of the first order. The piece was performed two afternoons. But the lack of applause did not prevent the work from being recognized in the artistic field as a parody of the Macbeth by William Shakespeare and to this day, in the midst of local and global political turbulence, Ubú is still very topical. The Picasso Museum in Barcelona opens this Wednesday Ubu painter. Alfred Jarry and the arts (until April 5), an exhaustive artistic investigation about the author, the work that revolutionized artistic Paris at the end of the 19th century and its influence as a precursor of the theater of the absurd, Dadaism and surrealism.

Divided into nine sections, the exhibition combines chronological and thematic order. Given some of the publications in which Jarry debuted as an art critic, the museum director and curator of the exhibition, Emmanuel Guigon (Morteau, France, 66 years old), explains the importance of Ubu as a character. For him, it is on the same level as Ulysses, Don Quixote or Madame Bovary. “Ubu has become a universal archetype,” he explains. “But, unlike his predecessors, the character surpasses all taboos. Since his first appearance in Now reyhis grotesque, disproportionate and comically cruel figure scandalized the public and paved the way for a modern myth. It symbolizes an unbridled word, an unleashed power and a provocative freedom, traits that Jarry even adopted in his own life as an extension of the character. “Ubú has established himself as a modern star, not without humor.”

Son of an upper-middle class family, Alfred Jarry was able to study in Paris although he did not graduate. The early death of his parents when he had just turned 20 allowed him to have money with which he could indulge his love of taverns and absinthe. It is said on the exhibition posters that his scattered life did not prevent him from producing a work as erudite as it was innovative in just 15 years (he died at 34 due to tuberculous meningitis). Thanks to his texts on art, he discovered artists then unknown and today undisputed masters such as Paul Gauguin, Pierre Bonnard, Armand Seguin or the Customs Officer, in whose house he settled when he ran out of all the inherited money. He also became friends with the nabis Paul Sérusier and Édouard Vuillard, as well as with Toulouse-Lautrec and Félix Vallotton, who would illustrate several of his works, such as The Almanac of Father Ubuwith images by Pierre Bonnard. All of these artists are profusely represented in the exhibition thanks to loans from museums such as the Pompidou and the Musée d’Orsay.

At the very beginning of the exhibition, which extends over two floors of the building, there is a photograph of Alfred Jarry pedaling a bicycle from which it is said that he was inseparable. Embedded in the sports print, a portrait of Jarry signed by the artist Hermann-Paul stands out in which he appears very young and serious. While putting the finishing touches on the assembly, the museum director says that he met Ubu rey when I was about 14 years old. “The impact was enormous. It is a very strong text. I have researched and worked a lot on Jarry and his character.”

For the sake of this admiration, in 2000 he held a small exhibition about Ubú at the Valencian Institute of Modern Art and, as a great bibliophile, he has searched for and acquired every text linked to the author’s universe. “Periodically, exhibitions are dedicated to Jarry in many European cities,” but Guigon assures that this exhibition that opens in Barcelona is “the most ambitious.” Not only because of the amount of work on display, 489 objects including paintings, drawings, magazines and bibliophilia, but because it is the result of the most complete research so far carried out on the Ubú phenomenon and its author.

Surreal inspiration

One of the many chapters of the tour explains the popularity that Alfred Jarry achieved, despite the poor reception of Ubu rey. It was a posthumous recognition led by André Breton, who dedicated a conference to him in March 1918. Jarry then became an inspiration for the surrealists. Breton completed the operation of making him known by including him in his anthology of black humor in 1940. The exegesis of his work was taken care of by the College of Pataphysics, the society dedicated to the investigation of “imaginary solutions” for non-existent problems, among other things. In this area dedicated to surrealism, the spectacular oil painting by Max Ernst stands out. Now the emperor (1923), on loan from the Pompidou museum.

It is not known for certain whether Jarry and Picasso met in person, but there is no doubt that they knew about each other. Both are present in one of the most striking exhibition sections. It tells that six months after the outbreak of the Civil War, Picasso made a series of vignettes to accompany the Guernica in the Spanish pavilion at the 1937 Paris International Exhibition. It is a kind of comic in which Franco is evoked as a Christian knight in medieval armor. We see him “facing the sun”, like a tightrope walker in the trenches, with an excessive phallus or on the back of a pig. The commissioner assures that the comparison with Ubú is evident. The poet left a strong impression on the young Picasso since 1905. This fascination led him to illustrate Ubú, to collect his works and his engravings. It is said that Picasso kept Jarry’s revolver as a relic.

In the Catalan theaters

The exhibition closes with a succession of rooms in which the reception of Ubú in Catalonia is told, a fundamental chapter in its stage history. Since the first representation of Ubu king in 1964 at the Adrià Gual School of Dramatic Art—behind closed doors and documented by Pilar Aymerich—until the emblematic Mort del Merma Created by La Claca and Joan Miró, the character has inspired some of the most audacious theatrical proposals in the territory. In 1981, the Teatre Lliure consolidated this reception with Operation Ubuin collaboration with Els Joglars and with scenery by Fabià Puigserver, an adaptation that became a milestone on the contemporary Catalan scene for being a brilliant parody of the then president of the Generalitat, Jordi Pujol.